AEO for solar installers: the first question changed this year.

Solar has always been bought on a spreadsheet: system size, production, the utility's rate, the incentives, the payback. In 2026 the top line changed. The federal residential credit's status is widely reported to have changed at the start of the year, and the first question a homeowner now asks an assistant is not which installer, but whether solar still makes sense for a house like theirs, in their state, with their utility. AEO for solar installers is the work of being the company whose honest, local answer to that question the assistant quotes — and this page states no incentive rule, no price and no payback figure, because the ones that stay true are the ones the installer publishes for its own market with the authority named.

The incentive question, answered without stating a rule

This page does not say what the federal change is. The research behind it read the change through installer blogs, which is not a source this site adopts, and a rule quoted on a page becomes wrong on a schedule nobody controls. What an installer can publish, and what the homeowner is actually asking, is the local version: which state and utility programs apply where you work, whether net metering exists under your utility and in what form, what your company does to help with paperwork, and the administering authority named as the source for the current rules. That page answers the first row of the chart and stays true as programs change. It is the same discipline the HVAC page applies to heat pump incentives, for the same reason.

Three quotes, three system sizes: explain the normalisation

Homeowners get three quotes and discover none of them match, because each proposes a different system size. The research found “compare on the same system size” as the standard advice, and almost no installer explains how. A page that says what an itemised quote should include, how to normalise proposals to the same size, and what a suspiciously cheap quote is usually leaving out is the page an assistant quotes while the homeowner stares at three PDFs — and it is trusted because it teaches the comparison rather than winning it.

Own, lease, or PPA: the twenty-year question

Who owns the system and the incentives under each model, what happens at the sale of the house, what each means over two decades. Homeowners ask an assistant because they suspect the sales conversation is steered. A plain explanation of the three, with no recommendation for any household and a clear statement of which your company offers and why, is the honest page and the one that gets quoted.

Payback: explain the assumptions, never the number

How a payback period is calculated, which assumptions can make it wrong — rate changes, production estimates, roof work, financing interest — and what a utility's rate structure does to the math. An installer that explains the spreadsheet is trusted when it fills one in.

The behavior underneath the spreadsheet

And 41% of consumers now always read reviews when browsing for a business, up from 29% the year before. In this trade the review that decides is written years after the install — did the system produce what was promised, did anyone answer in year five — and the last row of the chart shows homeowners asking about year eight, not day one.

The installer question is about year eight

The research found the installer question framed around longevity rather than price: will the company exist to honor the warranty, who services the system if it does not, are the crews employees or subcontractors. An industry with a history of installers disappearing has taught homeowners to ask. State your years, your crews, your warranty and who backs it, and what happens to service if your company were ever gone. Most installer sites replace that page with a savings calculator, which is exactly why writing it wins.

Local Services Ads, precisely

• Local Services Ads sit above the standard search ads and the map pack on service queries, and are billed per lead rather than per click.
• Eligibility runs through a background and licensing check that produces the Google Guaranteed badge — a verification signal the contractor earns once and carries.
• The placement is a Google surface only. A ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity answer to the same question does not read it, which is why a contractor can dominate LSA and be absent from the assistant answer on the same day.

What gets built, and in what order

• The does-it-still-make-sense page first, for your state and utility, with the authority named and no rule stated.
• The three-quotes page, what an itemised quote includes and how to normalise.
• The ownership-models page, plain, no recommendation.
• The payback-assumptions page, mechanism only.
• The year-eight page, years, crews, warranty, continuity.
• The entity pass. Company name, licenses, service area in text, years, crews, organization and local-business schema matching the visible page. Google states no special markup is required to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode — schema is for unambiguous parsing and classic rich results.

One prepared move per day, held in the approve queue, published only when the owner approves it.

How you know whether it worked

Scans re-ask the same homeowner questions on a schedule, so the record is a before and after rather than an assurance. Approved pages are submitted to Bing within minutes of going live, and Bing standing is the fastest indicator — independent testing found roughly 87% of ChatGPT's citations match Bing's top results (Seer Interactive, 2026), a measured correlation and not a mechanism OpenAI documents. Citations run to a median of about 6.8 days after indexing, with roughly 42% of pages cited within 30 days, in practitioner testing across 2026 (Semrush / practitioner testing, 2026). No date is promised. And 40–60% of the sources AI cites change every month (eMarketer, 2026).